| Abstract: |
The lands inhabited by the Lao people extend across the heart of the South-East Asian peninsula, from the frontiers of China on the north to the borders of Cambodia on the south. This vast hinterland is isolated from the coastal states of the region, and early European visitors rarely penetrated far enough into the interior to gather even the meagerest of information about it. Prior to the second half of the nineteenth century, it was almost a terra incognita to Western mapmakers, charted mainly by ‘cartographic imagination’.
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